More U.N. Insanity Paid For By U.S. Taxpayers

One year after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged at least $100 billion annually by 2020 to help Third World countries address climate problems attributed to America and capitalism at the U.N.-sponsoredWorld Climate-Change Summit in Copenhagen, the Cancun meeting that followed focused primarily upon formulating a plan of action to implement that commitment. This commenced literally with a vengeance, producing the design for a new $100 billion per year “Green Climate Fund” (GCF). Its purpose is nothing less than to fundamentally transform the global economy…beginning with ours.

And the key players? They include George Soros, a World Bank representative, and Lawrence Summers, former director of the White House National Economic Council and assistant to President Obama for economic policy. Be advised to take what is envisioned very seriously.

The first GCF meeting of the 40-member design team, the “Transitional Committee” (TC), took place in Mexico City on April 28-29. Its charge was to prepare “operational specifications” for the GCF in time for approval at U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Durban, South Africa last week. You can bet that its primary goal will be to finalize financing strategies to squeeze those annual $100 billion installments out of American consumers unencumbered by Congressional approvals.

According to plans, the U.N. would be granted taxing authority that will effectively transform its role of governance to “government” and preempt our national sovereignty. This falls in line with proposals prepared by a 20-member “High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing” assembled by U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon for the purpose of calling upon nations “to fundamentally transform the global economy-based on low-carbon, clean energy resources.” Resulting recommendations are to institute:

a carbon tax

a tax on international aviation and shipping

a financial transaction tax

a wire tax for producing electricity

redirection of 100% of all fossil fuel subsidies for international climate action.

Fox News reported possession of position papers indicating topics covered in meetings involving Ban ki-Moon and 60 of his top lieutenants during a two-day 2010 Australian Alpine Retreat discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of world agendas. Those topics included:

how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the Copenhagen fiasco

how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to encompass the idea of “global public goods”

how to keep growing U.N. peacekeeping efforts into missions involved in police, courts, legal systems and other aspects of strife-torn countries

how to capitalize on the global tide of immigrants from poor nations to rich ones, to encompass a new “international migration governance network”

how to make “clever use of technologies to deepen direct ties with what the U.N. calls “civil society”, meaning novel ways to bypass its member nation states and deal directly with constituencies that support U.N. agendas.

An underlying position paper theme those top U.N. bosses grappled with was how to cope with the pesky issue of national sovereignty that interferes with their global governance goal. As one paper put it: “the U.N. should be able to take the lead in setting the global agenda, engage effectively with other multinational and regional organizations as well as civil society and non-state stakeholders, and transform itself into a tool to help implement the globally agreed objectives.” It went on to state: “it will be necessary to deeply reflect on the substance of sovereignty, and accept that changes in our perceptions are a good indication of the direction we are going.”

And just how much of this sovereignty sabotage has to do with sinking capitalism, stifling consumption and achieving global wealth redistribution? A bunch.

As an opening session explained: “The real challenge comes from the exponential growth of the global consumerist society driven by ever higher aspirations of the upper and middle layers in rich countries, as well as the expanding demand of emerging middle-class in developing countries. Our true ambition should be therefore creating incentives for the profound transformation of attitudes and consumption styles.” A paper prepared by Secretary General Ban’s own climate change team called for “nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the global economy.”

Such ambitious goals will of course require lots money to carry out…our money, along with new taxing authority. And manufactured carbon-based climate change alarmism provides an excuse to get it.

In 2004 the United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) published a study addressing possible scenarios for implementing a global tax. It asked “How can we find an extra US $550 billion for development funding? Our focus is on flows of resources from high-income to developing countries.” The conclusion? “Any foreseeable global tax will be introduced, not by a unitary world government, but as the result of concerted action of nation states…The taxation of environmental externalities is an obvious potential source of revenue.” It went on to say “We are presupposing that the tax is indeed levied on individuals and firms in the form of a carbon levy.”

Another UNU-Wider publication states: “Support for an international ‘carbon tax’ has been growing since the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit focused international attention on the damage to the environment caused by excessive use of fossil fuels worldwide…Over 20% of the tax yields would originate in the U.S.”

As Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change admitted in an Investor’s Business Daily interview, “The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month [December, 2010] is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.”